Open-Source Message Queuing Protocol Set for Launch

JPMorgan and friends will launch an open-source messaging alternative to IBM MQSeries. Financial institutions are the primary target.

A group of leading user companies, vendors and other organizations plans to launch an open message queuing protocol that will enable users to create systems that compete with or replace proprietary technology.
On June 20, a group including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Iona Technologies, Red Hat, the Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team (TWIST, a European standards organization promoting open standards in the financial sector) and several other organizations are scheduled to launch AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).
Last year, John Davies, then a vice president of New York-based JPMorgan, which has been a leading participant in developing AMQP, said several million dollars had been spent on the overall project, then known simply as AMQ. Davies said the primary investors in the effort were financial institutions fed up with paying expensive licensing fees for proprietary message queuing technology from the likes of IBM and Sonic Software.

However, sources said that rather than release the entire AMQ code base the group had developed, the plan is to open-source the AMQ protocol and then enable companies to build systems around it or embed it into their operating systems or software stacks. The group is launching AMQP as a wire-level protocol and looking to gain support of standards organizations.

Read more here about AMQ.
Davies has since left JPMorgan and is now chief technology officer at C24 Solutions, a London-based software development company specializing in messaging and Web services technology. Davies said C24 would be interested in the technology for both development and to possibly sell services and support around it.
"We think this is something that is going to snowball and be big," Davies said in a recent interview. "This will be another implementation of a messaging protocol."

Indeed, one technologist involved in the project said the underlying intent of the project is to reduce the fees companies have to pay for technology such as IBMs MQSeries by providing "an open-source equivalent."
However, Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, questions whether another specification is necessary.
"A key question is whether dealing with such interoperability challenges is best handled at the messaging infrastructure level or at the service interface," Bloomberg said. "Is this just one more JMS [Java Message Service], which now has several vendor-specific implementations?"
Bloombergs argument is that with a protocol specification, somebody still has to go to the effort of building a system around it. But JPMorgan and friends maintain that this option is still bound to be less expensive than existing proprietary solutions and that savvy user organizations can build their own implementations, while others can rely on help from companies like C24 to provide support and services in a Red Hat- or JBoss-like model.
Neither Sonic nor IBM was able to respond before this article was posted. But in response to word of AMQ last year, Hub Vandervoort, vice president of strategic services at Bedford, Mass-based Sonic Software, said the idea of an open-source message queuing technology "is interesting to some, but open source doesnt have continuous availability, clustering, etc."
ZapThinks Bloomberg called AMQP a new specification for defining and developing messaging infrastructure that is supposed to be technology-agnostic, open and interoperable. "JPMorgan Chase Bank is looking to leverage AMQP for messaging infrastructure that crosses multiple platforms, languages and protocols, and resolves the bottlenecks of dealing with multiple middleware solutions," he said.
AMPQ has implementations on C and C++ and will support C# and Java, sources said.
Next Page: Target: Financial services sector.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.